A curious gesture when our own air defense is practically nonexistent. Three amphibians, good only for patrolling, and four Wildebeeste torpedo bombers, with no aerial torpedoes available closer than Singapore. The total lack of interceptor aircraft is criminal.
But the fleet, they say, will provide.…
“Old One! Old One!” Opal’s husky voice broke Sir Jonathan’s concentration. “Look! Look! Many airplanes coming to Kaitak. Now we will have enough.”
Twelve aircraft droned in formation through the clear skies above the green Kowloon Hills. The foremost swooped down toward the runway at Kaitak Airport, but pulled up a few hundred feet above the ground. Sir Jonathan’s sharp eyes saw black, egg-shaped pellets fall from their silver bellies like pregnant guppies releasing their young. Gray pillars of smoke rose from the airport, and an instant later he heard the explosions reverberate. White puffs burst around the formation, but the silver wings flaunting the red sun of the Imperial Japanese Air Force evaded the anti-aircraft fire contemptuously.
The next echelon dived vertically as if determined to impale itself in the ground. No more than a hundred feet above the airport, the warplanes pulled up with wing-straining deceleration, and the big black bombs under their bellies hurtled into the hangars. Smaller pursuit planes repeatedly swept over Kaitak, the crimson flashes of machine-gun fire winking from their wings.
Five minutes later, the raid was over. Thirty-six Japanese warplanes had destroyed the entire British Air Force in the Far East, as well as a clumsy four-motored Pan American Clipper scheduled to take off at 9:30 A.M. for the long island-hopping haul across the Pacific. The Clipper had missed escape by an hour and a half. The attack came just before eight in the morning, some seven hours after Japanese airpower had wiped out the American battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor on the morning of Sunday, December 7, on the other side of the International Dateline. At 4:45 A.M., Military Intelligence monitors in Hong Kong had intercepted coded signals warning Japanese abroad that war with Britain and the United States was imminent. At 6:45 A.M., Hong Kong Garrison Headquarters was informed that Japan had declared war. At 7:00 A.M., Tokyo home radio, heard clearly in Hong Kong, warned the Japanese people that they were at war with the two English-speaking powers. No preparation against air attack was however attempted, and none could have been effective.
Unprepared psychologically, depleted materially, and stripped of airpower, Hong Kong lay open to the three battle-tempered Imperial Army divisions that were massed on the Colony’s twenty-two-mile-long border with Japanese-occupied Kwangtung Province. The Japanese expected little ground resistance, and they were confident of sweeping aside that resistance in a few hours, at most a few days. Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi, commanding the task force, ceremonially downed a cup of sake with his staff officers and confidently awaited reports from his forward formations. Japanese infantrymen were already moving into British territory at Shataukok on the shore of Mira Bay at the eastern end of the border. Other units were striking across the muddy Shumchon River onto the flat central plain of the New Territories.
That portentous term “the fog of war” is a cliché, a self-vindication—and a fair description. Coined by historians to explain their inability to see a coherent picture of any engagement larger than a clash between two squads, it was adopted by the generals to justify the miasma of confusion that separates commanders from the men fighting in the field. The description is still derisively correct in the age of instantaneous radio and telephonic communications, when the fog of war even more thickly obscures the human male’s second favorite activity. Once committed to battle, the commanding officer of the smallest integral combat unit, the infantry company, finds it exceedingly difficult to learn what his own soldiers are doing, much less the enemy’s. The general, deploying brigades and divisions, finds it virtually impossible to follow the action over which he presides. Endowed with abundant leisure and keen hindsight, historians produce plausible accounts years later, but those accounts err as often as they are reasonably accurate.
Exceptions to the frustrating rule do however occur. During the first week of the eighteen-day battle for Hong Kong, Charles Sekloong’s vision was not obscured by the fog of war. He possessed a unique vantage point at the Headquarters of the Hong Kong Defense Command under Major General C. M. Maltby, an intelligent and gallant soldier thrust into an impossible assignment. Charles wore the red tabs of a staff officer on his lapels and the bronze crown surmounted by two embossed stars of a full colonel on his shoulder straps, but he commanded no troops. Unqualified for that function, he was ideally suited to the duties assigned to him. He spoke most of the languages of the polyglot force, and he knew the terrain intimately. He was, therefore, the chief channel through which tactical reports passed. Charles observed the debacle of British arms with great clarity and mounting despair. But his view of the global strategy in which Hong Kong played only a minor part was befogged by erroneous intelligence reports and by insistently impractical exhortations from London.
As the first Japanese units crossed the border, the first encouraging reports came into Defense Headquarters. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was massing Chinese armies to take Lieutenant General Sakai’s forces in the rear and save Hong Kong. Desperately wanting to believe, intelligence officers pointed out sagely that it was vitally important for the Nationalists to keep Hong Kong open as a backdoor to China; otherwise Chungking would be totally isolated. Only a few realists asked where Chiang Kai-shek would find those troops and why he should divert them from his own battles against the Japanese and the Communists.
But even those realists accepted authoritative intelligence regarding the low quality of the Japanese fighting man, while none saw irony in London’s command that Hong Kong be held “at all costs.” The Japanese, who had not performed spectacularly well against raggle-taggle Chinese formations, were for the first time confronting valorous, well-trained British soldiers. Charles, almost alone, did not believe Hong Kong could be held, and he expressed his doubts only to his father. That tough-minded octagenarian shared his son’s doubts, but cautioned Charles to voice them to no one else, not even to Mary, Sarah, or Jonnie.
Yet the first day’s action bore out London’s optimism. Major George Gray, commanding a company of Punjabi sepoys of Britain’s Indian Army, methodically demolished all border installations and withdrew southward in good order. He then laid a classic ambush north of the hamlet called Taipo Market. When the Japanese marched down the road in formation, the sepoys scythed them with rifle and machine-gun fire from the hillsides, killing hundreds. Undaunted, the Japanese pursued the Punjabis to the town of Taipo. Their column was, once again, massacred by the sepoys, who had been reinforced by an armored-car squadron. Elation succeeded the dogged determination Defense Headquarters had mustered at the first assault. Perhaps this once, just this once, the intelligence assessments were correct. The Japanese, it appeared, could not stand up to the disciplined British forces.
Nonetheless, the battalion to which Major George Gray’s Punjabis belonged continued to withdraw, as did the two other battalions of the Mainland Brigade defending the New Territories and Kowloon. They were the fifth battalion of the Seventh Rajputs, and a battalion of the Royal Scots, who were proudly known as the First of Foot, since they were the oldest infantry unit on the rolls of the British Army. Confronting overwhelming Japanese numbers and unchallengeable Japanese control of the air, they could only fight a delaying action until they reached their prepared positions at the narrowest point of the New Territories. Those fortifications extended from Shatin, so called for its Sandy Fields, in the east to Gin Drinkers’ Bay in the west, a favorite resort of weekend yachtsmen who asserted that the insatiable native mosquitoes were repelled by the smell of gin taken internally. The impregnability of Hong Kong’s Maginot Line, inevitably called Gin Drinkers’ Line, was distrusted chiefly by the Commanding General C. M. Maltby, who had arrived only a few weeks earlier. Besides, the Japanese were already outflanking Gin Drin
kers’ Line by landing in Kowloon from small craft to cut the Mainland Brigade off from Hong Kong Island.
Yet the first day of fighting on December 8 surprised the Japanese by the effectiveness of British resistance and confirmed the low British opinion of the Japanese. December 9 was, however, a British disaster.
Gin Drinkers’ Line pivoted on two major fortifications, the Shingmun Redoubt and the Golden Hill, both held by the Royal Scots, the First of Foot. General Sakai had realized a year earlier that pillboxes, trenches, and bunkers of the Redoubt were the key to the British defenses. His assault companies had trained for months on a replica constructed near Canton until their officers boasted: “We could take the place blindfolded.”
Noiseless in mitten-like tennis shoes, the assault troops were not blindfolded when they cut the barbed-wire of the Shingmun Redoubt at 10 P.M. on the ninth of December. Snug in their dugouts, the Royal Scots learned they were under attack when hand grenades tumbled down the ventilating shafts. It was death to remain underground; it was death to fight in the open and be cut down by Japanese machine guns. The Royal Scots, the First of Foot, fled south toward Kowloon, earning a new nickname, the Fleet of Foot.
Sustained by the Punjabis and reinforced by a company of Canadian Winnipeg. Grenadiers hastily transferred from the Island Brigade, the British sought to close the hole. It was like trying to patch a tire running at high speed. The Japanese streamed around them, and the British forces could not stand. On Thursday, December 11, General Maltby ordered the Mainland Brigade to withdraw to Hong Kong Island. The miniature Dunkirk across a miniature Channel was completed on Saturday, the thirteenth. The intervening days were brightened by astounding valor and besmirched by base cowardice. The Rajput and Punjabi sepoys executed that single most difficult maneuver, disengaging from an attacking enemy and withdrawing in constant contact with that enemy while preserving themselves as an intact fighting force. The Sikhs of the Hong Kong Police Force almost to a man went over to the Japanese. Scattered detachments of Volunteers fought desperately to win time for their women and children to embark on overladen ferries for Hong Kong Island. Bitter in defeat, the Royal Scots maintained just enough cohesion to retreat as a unit.
By December 14, it was over. All Britain’s mainland territories, more than three hundred square miles of the New Territories and Kowloon, had fallen to the Japanese in less than a week. Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi staged his veteran Thirty-eighth Division for the attack on twenty-nine-square-mile Hong Kong Island. The British Broadcasting Corporation was still celebrating the invincible valor of that impregnable fortress. The Union Jack was to wave over that fortress for less than two weeks longer.
“The Japs closed out that lease faster than any Tenancy Tribunal,” Captain Jonathan Sekloong told his second-in-command, Lieutenant Peter Hardin.
“They’ve saved the Gimo the trouble,” Hardin replied. “When the Nationalists get here, they can take over the New Territories. No need to wait till the lease runs out in ’97, Chink.”
Jonnie grinned at his old Stonyhurst nickname. The silly jokes and the gut-gripping anticipation were also reminiscent. The same sickly tension he had felt before a hard rugger match against Ampleforth electrified his Fifth Field Artillery Battery, which, on December 15, 1941, was emplaced above the fixed coastal gun defending Lyemun Pass, the eastern inlet to Hong Kong Harbor. Besides, Peter Hardin was privileged, not only his classmate at Stonyhurst, but a second or third cousin on his Sekloong grandmother’s side.
“Let the lawyers worry about that one, Peter,” Jonnie said. “All we do is hold till the other chinks arrive—the more the better.”
“And the faster the better,” Hardin answered. “Though we’re pretty snug here.”
Jonnie remembered his Uncle Harry’s tales of Nationalist military ineptitude too well to believe Chinese forces would charge to their rescue like the U.S. Cavalry in an American cowboy film. That hope, however, sustained most of the outnumbered, outgunned garrison, while immediate worries disturbed the commanding officer of the isolated battery.
“Not snug enough, Peter,” he said. “Do you really believe those Dinah Lays’ll stand a direct hit?”
“Well, Dinah’s a pretty durable girl,” Peter drawled. “But I’d like to have old Morosby right here with us.”
“What’s all this cock about Dinah Lay?” asked the Sergeant Major. “Never heard of the lady.”
“Pity, Bill.” Jonnie spoke with the easy informality of the Volunteers. “She might just kill you.”
“Poxed, eh?” the Sergeant Major laughed. “Well, I’m all right. Never met the lady, much less rogered her. Speak for yourself, Jonnie.”
“You’re new to Hong Kong, Bill, or you’d know Dinah Lay’s no lady,” Peter Hardin interjected. “We’re talking about the concrete blocks, our impregnable defense.”
“All right, chaps,” the Sergeant Major demanded. “What are you nattering about.”
“Dinah Lay was, still is, the cleverest and most expensive tart in the Colony,” Jonnie explained. “She was set up in a palatial Kowloon flat by old Stan Morosby of the Public Works Department. He bought her a flashy Lagonda coupé and hung her with jewels. Stan was a poor boy from Liverpool, and I’m not one to repeat slander, but rumor has it that he found the cash by … ah … cooperating with the Fook Wong Construction Company. I’m pretty sure the blocks are hollow and the concrete itself mostly sand. So they’re called Dinah Lays.”
“Well named,” the Sergeant Major conceded. “But a hell of a story to tell a man facing battle for King and country. No regard for troop morale, that’s the trouble with you temporary officers.”
A clear, high voice cut across their badinage, a familiar voice singing “The Lights of Home.”
“By God, Deanna Durbin,” Peter exclaimed.
“Shut up and listen,” said Jonnie. “The Japs are serenading us.”
I can see somebody there. The pure soprano wafted across the Harbor. Tender eyes and silver hair, beneath the lights of home.
“Damned nice of them,” Bill said. “Do you think we could request …”
A distant rattle truncated his labored jest. Somewhere over the water to their left rifles were firing.
“Searchlight, Bill!” Jonnie ordered. “Let’s see what the devil’s going on.”
The blue-white arclight probed the darkness. The whitecaps on the green waves broke in glowing spray, and a waterlogged basket drifted across the white circle of light. The circle moved slowly over the waters. The secrets of the night remained shrouded, and unseen soldiers fired their rifles in ragged rhythms. The light inched westward, persistent and vulnerable as a blind man’s cane.
Abruptly as if a Kodacolor slide had been inserted into a projector, a large fishing junk under full sail materialized in the white beam. Through his binoculars Jonnie saw Japanese soldiers squatting on the decks, their conical helmets shining dully. The searchlight illuminated a convoy of small sampans trailing the junk. All were laden with Japanese infantrymen who leveled their weapons at the intrusive light. Machine-gun bullets hammered on the concrete blocks, and the three Volunteers ducked.
“We’ve made them appear like a conjurer’s trick,” Jonnie said softly. “Now let’s see if we can make them disappear.”
“Target in sight,” the Sergeant Major bellowed. “Fire at will.”
The three field-pieces coughed in succession, and water-spouts geysered around the convoy.
“Have to do better than that,” Jonnie said conversationally. “Tell them to track.”
“Mark your shots,” the Sergeant Major bellowed. “Aim, damn it, aim—and fire!”
The second salvo rocked the junk and doused the Japanese with cold seawater, but the vessel sailed on.
“Traverse left one-half point,” Jonnie shouted. “Down one. Hit the little bastards this time. Hit them!”
Water-spouts bracketed the junk, rising on either side of the wildly rocking vessel. The junk rolled like a log in a millrace, and an ora
nge flash spurted from the foredeck. Three bodies rose high in the air to tumble into the sea amid jagged wooden strips.
“You’re on now,” Jonnie shouted. “Kill them! Kill the little bastards!”
The junk disintegrated under the explosions. One moment it was sailing forward, wounded but intact. The next, it had disappeared, and the water was alive with thrashing infantrymen. Jonnie watched mesmerized as some were pulled down by the weight of their packs, while others struggled with maimed arms and legs to avoid the deadly shower of debris falling from the sky. The foundering men shouted soundlessly, their mouths gaping wide in macabre pantomime. Through his binoculars the agony was, at once, too clear and too removed, as if he were the detached spectator of a stage play. Blood stained the green water with red streams that became pink tendrils and vanished in seconds.
Jonnie let his binoculars hang from their neckstrap and looked at his trembling hands. His stomach turned over, and bile rose bitter in his throat. He marveled briefly that his brothers Thomas and James had chosen, actually chosen, to devote their lives to such scenes. If this was an easy triumph, his men still unscathed, what could defeat be like?
“The sampans,” he heard himself shouting. “Get the sampans. Don’t let them get away.”
Tossed by the explosions and the frantic thrashing of their long stern oars, the sampans were difficult targets for artillery. They bobbed on the roiled waters like unsinkable walnut shells, but the searchlight pursued them implacably.
The Japanese infantrymen crouching behind the sampans’ frail sides twitched and jerked like manic puppets. From the trenches of the Royal Rifles of Canada on the left, streams of red tracers arched across the water to sweep the small boats. The enemy infantrymen despairingly attempted to return the fire. One after another long rifle barrel rose, wavered for an instant, and then fell back into the huddled mass.
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